Did Indian independence deliver its promises by 1964?

The short answer

• Partition’s legacy: a state that feared its own divisions. Partition shaped the constitution’s balance of power. The founders had seen political mobilization around identity help break the country in 1947, and feared another fragmentation. They gave the central government authority to redraw states and take over a state government in an emergency. A strong centre had already demonstrated its reach: Vallabhbhai Patel and V. P. Menon integrated more than 550 princely states by 1949. The republic would be a federation, but one whose national government had substantial means to hold it together.
• Universal suffrage as a deliberate gamble. The change in the electorate was as striking as the change in government. The Act of 1935, under which Congress first governed in 1937, gave the vote to about 35 million people selected by property and education. The Constituent Assembly rejected such tests and enfranchised every adult at once. A movement that claimed to represent all Indians had reason to let all of them choose their government. This made India the first large and poor country to attempt democracy on such a scale before literacy or prosperity had arrived.
• The language movements. Congress had promised linguistic provinces since 1920, and the demand did not disappear with independence. Telugu, Marathi, Kannada and Malayalam speakers lived across boundaries inherited from old provinces and princely states; Telugu districts, for example, were divided between Madras and Hyderabad. Their speakers pressed for the promised states through petitions and elections, and eventually through Potti Sriramulu’s fast. The central government wanted to postpone the question, but its own earlier promise and the strength of the movements kept it alive.
• Cold War choices and the border with China. Nehru’s ambition to remain independent of both Cold War blocs depended in part on friendly relations with China. The Panchsheel agreement of April 1954 set out five principles of peaceful coexistence and accepted Tibet as part of China. India left the boundary unraised, assuming that the 1914 McMahon Line in the east and its own maps in the west would stand. That assumption came under pressure when Indian patrols found China’s road across Aksai Chin in 1957–58, the Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959, and India’s Forward Policy placed small army posts in disputed territory in 1961. Each government regarded the land as its own, so each could see the other’s movements as aggression.

What it changed

A democracy that held. Elections had to become a habit before the first one could count as the beginning of a durable democracy. India held its second and third general elections on time in 1957 and 1962, and power passed peacefully to Lal Bahadur Shastri after Nehru’s death. Kerala tested another aspect of the system. In 1957 it elected a Communist government, among the first anywhere to take office through a free election. The centre accepted it until dismissing it in 1959, revealing the reach of Delhi’s constitutional powers. As many other newly decolonized states moved toward one-party or military rule, India’s democratic survival became its most cited achievement.

The unfinished revolution of caste and gender. The republic could change the law more quickly than it changed social relations. The constitution abolished untouchability, while the Hindu Code laws of 1955–56 gave Hindu women rights to divorce and inherit. Ambedkar had resigned from Nehru’s cabinet in 1951 when the Hindu Code Bill stalled. In October 1956 he left Hinduism and converted to Buddhism at Nagpur with several hundred thousand followers. His warning remained a challenge to the republic’s achievement: political democracy needed social democracy beneath it if it was to survive.

A planned economy and its limits. The planners gave India steel mills, dams and research institutes, and industry grew quickly from a low base. These were foundations for an industrial state, but they did not feed the country at the same pace. National income grew only about 3.5 to 4 per cent a year and farming lagged behind. By the early 1960s India depended on American wheat supplied under PL-480, a United States law selling surplus grain to poorer countries. The droughts of 1965–66 would make food an emergency for the next government. Most Indians lived in villages, where change was much slower than the growth of the industrial base.

Borders still in dispute. The internal reorganization left India with a more settled map inside the union than at its edges. China held Aksai Chin after the 1962 war, about 38,000 square kilometres claimed by India; the boundary has never been agreed. Kashmir remained divided along the 1949 ceasefire line, and India and Pakistan fought again little more than a year after Nehru’s death. The contrast with 1857 is striking: then the edges were secure while the interior was in revolt; the map Nehru left in 1964 had a settled interior and disputed frontiers.